Mariam Williams | Help ease our history deficit

9:28 PM,
Oct. 26, 2013

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Written by

Mariam Williams
Columnist

When Kentucky poet laureate and University of Kentucky professor Frank X Walker read recently at the Louisville Free Public Library from his new collection, "Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers," he said most of his freshmen have never heard of Evers and aren't ashamed of this.

Students go blank after naming Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and President John F. Kennedy as civil rights-era victims of political assassination. These millennial generation adults "tend to condense the civil rights struggle to somewhere between 'I have a dream,' and 'Rosa Parks sat down.' And that's it. ...